There are so many compelling and thought provoking things happening every day that it’s ridiculously easy to miss a few you’d rather have known about. Today, I see my job as helping you avoid that unfortunate circumstance. Read on and be enlightened.
Question: How many books must an author sell in order to make the New York Times Bestseller List?
Answer: A minimum of 5000 book sales in a single week across diverse retailers and from multiple geographic locations.
There are ways to manipulate sales, chief among them bulk sales and authors buying their own books. Wikipedia has a nice synopsis of sales manipulation:
Manipulation by authors and publishers. In 1956, author Jean Shepherd created the fake novel I, Libertine to illustrate how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales. Fans of Shepherd’s radio show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on the Times list. Author Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) attempted to “butter-up” Times-reporting booksellers and personally bought large quantities of her own book. Author Wayne Dyer (Your Erroneous Zones) purchased thousands of copies of his own book. Al Neuharth (Confessions of an S. O. B.), former head of Gannett Company, had his Gannett Foundation buy two thousand copies of his own autobiography. In 1995, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent $200,000 to buy ten thousand copies of The Discipline of Market Leaders from dozens of bookstores. Although they denied any wrongdoing, the book spent 15 weeks on the list. As a result of this scandal the Times began placing a dagger symbol next to any title for which bookstores reported bulk orders. However, daggers do not always appear; for example Tony Hsieh‘s Delivering Happiness was known to have been manipulated with bulk orders but didn’t have a dagger.
Enter stage right former Vice President Mike Pence. In 2021, CNN reported the ex-VP had signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster worth $3 million to $4 million, a pay day few, if any, Trump alums will get, especially if they did not resign immediately after the 6 January insurrection. Also not getting book deals are members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 presidential elections. All these people are damaged goods in the publishing world. Nothing personal; publishing is a business.
To fulfill the first half of his deal, Pence recently released So Help Me God. Now, it is assumed by everyone masochistic enough to follow the political scene that Pence aspires to run for President in 2024 (he also aspires to win) and that his book lays a marker down, a sort of sword in the sand. But how to get people to read it (Another question: How to get them to believe it?)? Although Pence is known to be deeply religious (in his own way) his book isn’t exactly as captivating as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which spent 136 weeks on the Times Bestseller List.
The way out of this dilemma is to join the manipulators. And that’s what Mr. Pence did. As reported by Zach Everson, writing for Forbes, on 9 November 2022, Pence’s PAC, the Great America Committee, paid Books on Call NYC $91,000 for what the PAC described as “collateral materials,” according to a report the PAC filed in December with the Federal Election Commission. A spokesperson for Pence confirmed the money went to buy the book at $21.78 per copy, 4,178 of them to be precise, leaving friends and family only having to buy another 822 to make the Bestseller list. Sort of reminds me of Donald Trump in the early 1990s masquerading as fictional publicist John Miller (sometimes John Barron) and calling reporters to let them know what a brilliant and wonderful person his employer Donald Trump was.
Because Pence was not yet an official candidate for the 2024 election, it was legal for his PAC to do this.
So Help Me God debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction and remained there for six weeks. The Times says when retailers report bulk orders of a book a dagger marking is supposed to appear beside the book’s name on the List. Inexplicably, no dagger ever appeared next to So Help Me God.
If you’re interested in being able to talk about So Help Me God without having to actually read it, you can find a number of reviews all in one place. The general verdict from all of them: Although the book is “well-written and well-paced,” (so says the Wall Street Journal), once again Pence is all things to all people. Whenever he writes something in So Help Me God, you can be sure it will be followed by, “On the other hand…”
I know it’s not charitable, but Mr. Pence has always reminded me of a cross between the David Copperfield’s unctuous Uriah Heep and a mortician describing his casket collection to the relatives of the dearly departed.
“Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful…since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” The defeats Pence documents in So Help Me God are the ones that make him look good.
One thing Pence doesn’t talk about in the book is his brother Greg, a member of the House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district since 2019. That’s the seat brother Mike held for 12 years. On the day of the insurrection, after the madding crowd had erected a gallows outside the Capitol Building and were now marching through the halls looking for brother Mike and screaming, “Hang Mike Pence,” Greg was with his brother and family. The Secret Service evacuated him with the Vice President.
Hours after emerging from a secure location, Mike Pence gaveled the joint session of Congress back in session and presided over the certification of the election, despite Trump’s demands. His finest hour. The one the history books will mention.
Greg Pence, meanwhile, joined 146 other Republican election-denying members of Congress who sided with Trump and cast a vote rejecting the outcome in Pennsylvania, the state that clinched the election for Biden.
You won’t find any of that in So Help Me God.
